March 27, 2005

Bobby Fischer is Insane

There's just no milder way of putting it. It seems pointless to me to put such a mentally deranged individual on trial, as the US government has been attempting to do. What is the point of making a martyr of a man who's been going ever further off the rails for the last 30 years?

NO ONE expected him to go quietly but, even by his own standards, Bobby Fischer’s farewell to Japan yesterday was especially scabrous and hate-filled.

After nine months of captivity and bitter legal struggle the former world chess champion flew to freedom in Iceland, spraying his vitriol far and wide. Japanese politicians, he declared, were “gangsters”. The US was “Jew-controlled”. “This was not an arrest,” he said, in the few minutes that he was audible to reporters between his arrival at Narita airport in Tokyo and his departure for Reykjavik. “It was a kidnapping cooked up by Bush and (the Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro) Koizumi. They are war criminals and should be hanged.”

To underline his point, he unzipped his trousers as he approached the airport, and made as if to urinate on the wall. This is the man who on the night of September 11, 2001, applauded the attacks on the United States as “wonderful news”, expressing the hope that Americans as a consequence “will imprison the Jews, they will execute several hundred thousand of them at least”.

What makes Fischer's anti-semitic outbursts particularly perplexing is that his mother (and probably also his father) was Jewish, making him a member of the very group he loves to harangue in his tirades; Fischer seems to be in some sort of perverse competition with Otto Weininger for "Most virulently self-hating Jew". If it were anyone else other than Fischer engaging in such antics, the psychiatrists would have written him a mandatory prescription of Zyprexia or Haloperidol by now, and it's been a principle of the law since Roman times that the mentally unhinged cannot be held legally responsible for their actions; it would be best for everyone if US action against this lunatic were simply quietly dropped.

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Comments

It would also be good since the US is being quite immoral in it's ridiculous pursuit of Bobby. Racism is wrong, but the arrogance of the US flagrantly breaking the law to persecute Fisher is also very wrong. In addition, I give little credence to the presentation of anyone in the media e.g. Howard Dean 2004.